Ageism is real in the Vally but it can cut both ways. In my current company we did a SWOT analysis and one of our advantages was "many old farts, and many former colleagues friends".
Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us but it's really valuable if you have already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime. And in your 50s you're probably an empty nester, and can easily put in a 50+ hour week when necessary (which it often is, but not all the time, in a startup) and get more done in 40 hours than the squirts do in 60+.
You need a mix of ages and backgrounds. A bias to youth is as bad as a bias towards time-in-grade, or any other such bias.
> Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us
> already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime.
What is it with this industries lack of interest in investing in people yet demanding so many hours that you can't learn anything new at least nothing deep. Why not just make everyone a contractor but pay them appropriately as a result.
I guess I phrased that poorly! I meant battle scars are important: not everybody will have them (some will acquire those scars in the future). In other words, experience is important.
Sometimes experience gets in your way ("No, a scripting language will be too slow for this") and other times it saves you a huge amount of grief ("Really, we had better plumb that now, it will save us a lot of pain down the road").
Not sure I suggested many hours (quite the opposite) or not learning anything new.
Maybe it wasn't phrased as intended, but my point is few companies are willing to take someone on just because they haven't done tech X even if they are seasoned in tech Y which is broadly similar and have all of the communication, team working, leadership, problem solving and domain skills. Because they need to "hit the ground running".
The flipside is that of course employees don't hang around along in IT as they need to keep moving to gain the experiences they need to make their CV look reasonable. So I guess it is perpetuated on both sides.
Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us but it's really valuable if you have already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime. And in your 50s you're probably an empty nester, and can easily put in a 50+ hour week when necessary (which it often is, but not all the time, in a startup) and get more done in 40 hours than the squirts do in 60+.
You need a mix of ages and backgrounds. A bias to youth is as bad as a bias towards time-in-grade, or any other such bias.